Everything seems to be getting worse; perhaps we are close to the center of the widening gyre. On a global scale, political instability and climate change are so vast that possible solutions seem distant and intangible. At the same time, daily commodities like clothing and food continue to worsen in quality. In this moment, dystopian anxiety has become a disheartening but seemingly necessary worldview. This decline feels inescapable, extending to physical and digital space; the internet tools we rely upon continue to deteriorate as climate emergency further endangers our planet. Amidst all this, the idea of a utopia, a perfect place, seems naive and hopelessly unattainable—unless we revise our understanding to imagine utopia not as an unreachable destination, but as a flexible foundation for thinking critically about the present.  

This syllabus offers an introduction to how we might use utopian thinking as a reference point for understanding creative production. Through analyzing works of art and design—which have always existed to imagine and present alternate realities—it will seek to expand our understanding of utopias beyond one prescriptive definition, and demonstrate the utility of utopian thinking as a framework for redefining collective aspirations. The following works serve as responses to the challenges of their respective moments: each contains a way of seeing, a means of resisting ambivalence, a means of time travel, a radical act of optimism.  

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Thomas More and Jose Muñoz – utopia as place and utopia as queer futurity 

In 1516, amid growing religious upheaval across Europe, Thomas More published Utopia, a story depicting the governance, living arrangements, and sociopolitical structure of a perfect fictional society. On the crescent-shaped island of Utopia, residents live in houses with back gardens, all with unlocked doors and gates so that anyone can enter any house or garden as they wish. There is no need for private property, as currency, gold, and jewels are either nonexistent or devalued. To fulfill the community’s needs for basic items, materials, and services, each Utopian is required to work six hours a day in one of the essential trades: masonry, carpentry, or metalsmithing. While More does not describe Utopia as having a particular aesthetic style, the island’s idyllic functions are derived from a rigid design sensibility that emphasizes open houses and wide streets within neatly organized neighborhoods. 

Of course, all this is too good to be true, and contradictions abound within the island. Though there is no scarcity, as public goods are distributed freely, Utopia remains dependent on the continuous labor of chained slaves. The residents’ needs for basic possessions and materials are fulfilled, enabling them to live free of economic struggle, but it comes at the cost of suppression and surveillance. The island specifically does not allow taverns or other spaces for socializing or secret meetings, and frowns upon leisure time. These contradictions are prevalent yet unacknowledged throughout the text, presented as necessary to maintaining the community’s charmed yet suppressive existence.

Perhaps More’s most explicit acknowledgement lies in the name of the island itself, in utopia’s twofold etymological origin. In one spelling, eu + topos means the good place; in another, more popularly-held spelling, ou-topos means the “not” place—the nowhere place. Within this title, never clarified by More, contains the inherently traitorous nature of any utopian place: its dependency on control, and its impossibilities. 

In 2009, nearly 500 years later, queer theorist José Muñoz published “Cruising Utopia: The Then & There of Queer Futurity,” abstracting utopia beyond its place-based definition. Crucially, Muñoz argues that queerness itself is a utopian process, bound to a constant struggle for liberation and an attitude necessitated by focus on the future. He asserts that queerness in the 21st century is nonexistent, writing that “queerness is not yet here… we are not yet queer.” This is not to invalidate forms of queer identification, but rather to suggest that queerness in its current form is present, yet not fully realized; it is always in the process of becoming.

In contrast to More, Muñoz emphasizes that the current “nonexistence” of queer plurality does not necessarily make its realization impossible. Queerness as an idealized state is a horizon, not a physical place. While restrictions were inherent to the island of Utopia in order to preserve perfection, a queer future is something that must be liberated, something that can only be reached by eliminating the heteronormative conditions that currently limit existence. This sentiment positions utopia in all three temporal periods—within the struggle for “true” queerness lies a simultaneous critique of our past, liberation of our present, and hope for the future. 

Essential to forming this new understanding, Muñoz demands, is a consideration of art, performance, and culture as blueprints for visualizing an idealized queer future. Not all of the following examples of art and design are explicitly queer, but they all inhabit a shared utopian leaning. Creative production has the power to resist preexisting normativity, and as such art and design can help us realize alternative possibilities for living and create spaces for new understandings of identity and collectivity to emerge. 

Kevin McCarty – utopia as liminal space

To cement the relationship between utopia, queer identity, and artistic production, Muñoz introduces Kevin McCarty’s photography series, titled The Chameleon Club. The project depicts queer clubbing spaces in Los Angeles with a distinct absence of human subjects: each image, named for where it was taken, captures an empty venue with the lights still on. There are no indications of time, nor anything that suggests the arrival or departure of any patrons; thus, it is purposely ambiguous whether the performance has already occurred, or has yet to happen. In the accompanying artist statement, McCarty writes that “[his] utopia existed at the doorway on the threshold — neither space at one time and in both simultaneously.” The deliberate uncertainty of McCarty’s work affirms the importance of queer social spaces, continually under threat of erasure, while also inviting viewers to imagine both what was and what could be. Capturing past queer sociality and future potential within each photograph allows the viewer to think of queerness as existing simultaneously in the “here” and the “not yet here.”

Further reading/viewing: The Principle of Hope, by Ernst Bloch

Lauren Halsey – utopia as Black futurity

Just as Muñoz presents art as a vehicle for reenvisioning queerness, it can also act as a conduit for analyzing collectivity within ethnic communities, and fighting for a more inclusive future within the present day. Lauren Halsey’s artistic practice refracts this thesis, shifting focus to the Black community through recreations of her childhood neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Her 2020 show, staged at David Kordansky’s Los Angeles location, invited viewers to walk through a six-foot-tall maze of hand-painted, rainbow-colored signs and structures that resemble storefronts and advertising seen throughout the South Central area, historically a predominantly minority neighborhood. 

The installation, awash with holographic foil and saturated neon color, depicts a sort of fantasy world for Halsey, who has referred to her practice as “business taxidermy.” Despite its dreamlike quality, the work contains reminders of the Black community’s ongoing struggle towards liberation; one sign reads “CLOSED FOR MURDER & DISRESPECT OF BLACK PEOPLE”—alluding to a painful past history presented without context. Halsey’s decision to stage her work in a private gallery recalls bell hooks’ “Postmodern Blackness,” in which hooks writes that “third-world scholars, especially elites … who never notice or look at black people on the streets, who render us invisible … in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality.” In response, Halsey physically places gallery patrons in the streets of her imaginary neighborhood while the real one exists several freeway exits away. She asks viewers to consider items and symbols of popular culture—hair treatments named after Black celebrities, Chester the Cheetah, a sign for a variety shop offering fax services—in the context of the gallery, a place with notorious associations of “high” culture. 

Halsey’s creative practice serves as her utopian response, a method of recreating a beloved place that exists outside of time. The artwork is both generalized and specific to her own memory, eulogizing businesses and storefronts of Los Angeles past while simultaneously celebrating what remains and imagining what could be. Her work seeks not to plaster over suffering or contradictions, in the way of More’s island, but instead poses a question embedded within its rainbow forms: how can we imagine the continuation of Black social culture? One piece, designed to look like the sign of a generic mom-and-pop store, reads: “WE ARE STILL HERE,” a tribute to the past, present, and future; Halsey’s cementation that history will always structure present collectivity. And in the sign-off of the gallery notes: “No relief. Except in memory.” (cite) 

Further reading/viewing: bell hooks’ “Postmodern Blackness;” an SSense chat between Lauren Halsey and Essence Harden; Telfar Clemens on challenging modes of exclusivity and luxury through Black identity

The Shakers – utopia as community utility 

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers, sought to create a utopian society via the applied conditions of communal living. Reaching almost 6000 members in the mid-19th century, the Shakers believed that heaven on Earth was possible, so long as they prioritized honesty, simplicity, and sustainability (in an environmental, economic, and social sense). These values dictated a design identity: they considered ornamentation excessive, and veneers “deceitful.” All furnishing was made from common American wood and used simple rectangular forms, seeking to mirror Christ’s humble existence. Their furniture, originally created with the express purpose of utility, became widely known for its minimal and unassumingly stylish design.  

Becoming a Shaker recalls the process of joining More’s island of Utopia, both with similarly suppressive natures of inclusion. Citizens were never allowed to leave the island, which was surrounded by a deep moat of water; while joining the Shakers was less extreme, one was required to relinquish all ties to their past life and embrace the community in full. The Shakers demanded celibacy, and both sex and procreation were forbidden, thus requiring all new members to join via adoption or conversion. By necessity, all aspects of Shaker living were derived from their shared values. 

Different religious sects have varying views on how devotional art and architecture may visualize abstract religious themes; uniquely, the Shaker visual style also influenced the built nature of the homes and structures they lived and worked in. Without the trappings of decoration, Shaker interiors focused exclusively on proportion and form. The oft-replicated Shaker chair featured a ladder back made out of slats, for ease of transport, and later versions added a mechanism that allowed the user to lean back without toppling over. The bottom slats were placed at the exact height for them to be picked up and hung on wooden peg railings that ran around the ceiling of most interiors, allowing the floor to be emptied for ease of cleaning and gathering.

Even the act of sitting on benches during moments of worship contained a utopian leaning: a favoring of community over individual, a rejection of hierarchy, each person sitting on the same plane. Shaker design demonstrated how everyday objects, even those left unadorned and relatively unexceptional, retain an ability to communicate communal ideas of person and place.

Further reading/viewing: Emily Bode Aujla’s exhibition on Shaker textile creation

The Sea Ranch — utopia as wayfinding, environmental conservation

The condominiums and houses of Sea Ranch are 110 miles—or, as a later critic would put it, “two hours by Porsche”— from San Francisco, close enough to have a metropolitan leaning but so remote that approaching the development, nestled between redwood forest and unforgiving cliffs, leaves the sense that one has arrived in an entirely different world. 

Condominium One, built in 1963, was the project’s first response to the rows of single-family zoning that had begun to spread throughout American suburbia. Its visual qualities seem quintessentially Californian now, but were unconventional in contrast to the Brutalist, concrete structures of postwar Modernism: an open floor plan that emphasized “the individual and the collective,” unfinished local Douglas Fir and redwood, and reverence for natural light. Lawrence Halprin, one of the project’s primary architects, believed that it was important to create structures that followed geologic formation, decay, and erosion, and so a sloping roof was added to resemble crashing waves or rocky bluffs. The floor plan of each airy and bright condominium also contained an exhaustive attempt to ensure that every unit would have a unique vista of the coastline, reversing the commodified practice of charging more for access to a highly coveted view. 

If houses are time capsules into past histories, Sea Ranch—especially Condominium One— exists as a manifesto for how domestic living and environmental conservation might intersect. A document titled “Sea Ranch Principles” lists the team’s intentions for the project in a form of two lists titled “YES” and “NO.” Items in the “NO” column include: “enormous houses,” “uniformity,” “Elitist (Pebble Beach/Carmel).” 

The designers and architects of Sea Ranch viewed their projects as the beginning of a new way of California living, and as such we can view Sea Ranch as a wayfinding project of sorts: designs that place themselves in an American architectural context as well as the environmental history of California. The homes exist as a project whose influence eclipses their practical function—enduring symbols of paradise made possible at the edge of the world. 

Further reading/viewing: “Journey to the Sea Ranch;” Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s “destructive” supergraphics movement; the Case Study Houses of California; Kelsey Rose Williams on historic houses

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Utopian Visions Through Art and Design references “H” is for Historic House, by Kelsey Rose Williams.